Q After years of caring for my mother who has Alzheimer’s disease and watching her decline, we are thinking of moving her to an assisted-living facility. Are there some guidelines that will make this move smooth? I am not even sure that we sele...

Flu

MOST RECENT STORIES

Parades

The Pasadena Tournament of Roses has cancelled its annual horse show, EquestFest, due to an outbreak of Equine Herpes virus in Los Angeles County. Last month, the California Department of Food and Agriculture quarantined the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, the venue for EquestFest every year on Dec. 30. Veterinarians identified 13 cases of Equine Herpes Virus (EHV-1), an infection that causes respiratory disease, neonatal foal death and neurological disease. None were found...

Marijuana

Many medical marijuana patients were worried that a ballot measure legalizing cannabis for recreational use in California would make the price of their medicine go up. Instead, for some of them, pot just got cheaper, though maybe not for long. The Board of Equalization recently sent notice that anyone who has both a doctor’s recommendation for marijuana and a county-issued ID card identifying them as a patient no longer has to pay state sales tax thanks to Proposition...

Lifestyle

Earlier this year, Los Angeles County launched a new public health campaign for families with children 5 years old and younger. Its focus is to shut off televisions, mobile devices and other screens and engage children in fun indoor and outdoor activities that get them up and moving. This campaign was created to help reverse the trend of increasing obesity rates among preschoolers in Los Angeles in light of recent national studies showing that young children are getting an average of...

Access to health care

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama took on the problems of a lack of access to health care and high cost, but he and Democrats paid a political price. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to undo much of what Obama put in place, and pledged to make the system better. Although Trump is lacking in specifics, he seems to want to make costs his priority. States, insurers, businesses, and individuals would get more leeway to sort out access. Health care keenly...

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Associated Press|1 week, 4 days ago

Terrorist attacks

Tattooed and bandana-clad Denver Cooley, pastor of a church that caters to scary-looking motorcycle riders, was shaken by the Dec. 2 San Bernardino terrorist attack. “I don’t think you can be in San Bernardino and not be changed by this,” said Cooley, who lives in the city and leads Roadhouse Biker Church, barely a mile from the Inland Regional Center, where the mass shooting took place. “San Bernardino, we’ve never been an innocent...

Terrorist attacks

One year or many. Grief has no deadlines. In the raw aftermath of the Dec. 2 terrorist attack, we were shaken to our core, looking for understanding. The gut-wrenching horror seemed surreal — the facts did not coincide with our sense of reality. In the days and weeks that followed, the whole community tried to make sense of what happened that day at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. But it was senseless. After a few days, the City...

Access to health care

Health coverage and immigration status are inextricably linked for many Californians. Citizens and many lawfully present immigrants are eligible for most health care options. For other immigrants, insurance availability varies by status. If you’re an unauthorized immigrant, for instance, you can’t purchase a plan from Covered California, the state health insurance exchange, or get full access to Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program for low-income...

By Emily Bazar
Kaiser Health News|1 week, 5 days ago

Terrorist attacks

With San Bernardino’s Inland Regional Center visible from her office window, psychotherapist Nancy Bohl-Penrod is constantly reminded of the deadly terrorist shooting that occurred there Dec. 2 and the months she and her colleagues spent consoling first responders, victims’ families and survivors. As Bohl-Penrod and other counselors worked tirelessly to guide those affected by the attack through the tragedy, they suffered themselves. Some internalized their...

Education

Most of the third-graders in Anita Parameswaran’s class at Daniel Webster Elementary in San Francisco have had experiences so awful that their brains won’t let them easily forget. “Whether it be that they’ve been sexually molested, or they’ve seen domestic violence, or shootings, or they know somebody who’s passed away,” Parameswaran said, “I would say every single year about 75 percent, give or take, come in with a lot of...

By Jane Meredith Adams
EdSource Today|2 weeks ago

Hospital and clinic services

Even if there’s a retail health clinic less than a 10-minute drive away, consumers are just as likely to go to the emergency department for low-level problems like bronchitis or urinary tract infections, a recent study found. “Our results aren’t necessarily the wooden stake in the heart of retail clinics,” said Grant Martsolf, a policy researcher at the Rand Corp. and the lead author of the study, which appeared online this month in the Annals of Emergency...